The Good Life

In a stuffy 4th floor apartment of a rat infested building in the crotch of Marseille, being droned to sleep by the A- symmetrical scratching and the cricket like vibratory language rats my mind opened. It was here while sleeping on the floor under the window that over looks the trannys and whores working the night shift on Curiol street. This window with an audio view, AKA Gato's V.I.P. entrance, was never closed due to the intense mediterranean waves of salty heat that would roll in and sweep out the cigarette smoke-rings that seemed too tired to move. Gato - the cat who would bring me half chewed rat babies in the morning as some twisted gesture of affection, the only form of affection I'd seen in a while. He would sit up at the foot of my foamy floor protector, proudly purring while i would lay there and accept this sole symbolic sign of feline affection as a sort of surrogate love. We would both hold out as long as possible until our magnets would butt together in a head butt - head rub, so affectionate he would lose his footing on the floor- so hard he was pressing into me. So we would rub our heads together, until I felt nervous about the kinds of parasitic pirate hangers on he may have picked up in the dirty salty streets of this amazing place.
I felt a wave of belonging sweep over me.
This is where I belong, I thought.
A foreign feeling after years of visiting and leaving and returning and leaving again.
Even architecturally I could tell I might fit in here.
Finally a break from the bleak and depressing conservative-monotonously efficient and economically responsible buildings that make up the relatively young cultural centers of my native Canada.
Not neither the typical pompous and over bearing beauty of romanticized and flowery European buildings, all sweet as hell on the outside and crumbling from within.
(Like L.A. Middle Aged housewives, where all the corrective surgery and slutty clothes in the world cannot stop natures decomposition and best before date given to everything organic.)
Marseille was crumbling inside and out, and beautiful because of it, proud of its cracks, scars, crows-feet and lines of abuse. A city so rich in this resulting character that I am sure money hungry interior designers must pay good gobs of paper to try to recreate in their "rustic" lofts or restaurants.
I might finally be in the right place at the right time.
Space and time.
Markets resembling Star Wars.
And everyone agreeing in their eyes that the time is really now.
A city living with loads of history artistically and revolutionary, a place where cops are wary of the people, not the other way around. A place so cool and fresh and which somehow has not fallen into the trap of glory days and has managed to stay out of the decorative bottles of nostalgia so many of the other former famously frenetic, fallen and subsequently gutted and dinsey-fied centers of art like Paris, NYC and even the eventual certain addition of Berlin have become pirate shipped inside of...
Marseille has yet to deal with an exploitation issue.
Among the car horns, whore fights and rat squeals my head finally got quiet.
Not in the lonely introverted and heavy way, but a lightness came over me.
A feeling bizarre and foreign to me, but welcome. Like testicles dropping inside my mind, I felt my coming of age.
It was bound to happen. I think the people I've loved could attest to that.

I'll have to send a group email.

The thing is;
I felt a change coming on, and questions were beginning to see answers, and things suddenly became clear- if not less muddy. The only way i can put it, is that in this tiny little place, with an autistic epilleptic child screaming his pure un-filtered expressions of joy or fear or both, and his typical tortured struggling artist father with his slightly pschyzophrenic tantrums and his wife the mexican mamma princess with a stern beauty and grace from years of pent up rage and anger, with all of this just waiting to boil over, with all this, I finally was able to focus.
Its like i could turn the sound off, visualize my atoms, or me as an atom, being magnetic, and drawing in all the pieces of the puzzle, that I need or may need. and because its an honor system, I realized I had to give back too..
So..
I am finding a way to make this world a better place,
the good life.

The good life is Not available in a bottle or a can.
No it doesn't wait for you to cash in your RRSPS.
Its not for rent or for hire,
and it wont be waiting till we retire.
i am finding the good life, or it is finding me.

R.I.P. Dave Wenger

Me on the rant line after dave died..



M Hey, this isn’t so much of a rant as it’s an RIP to Dave Wenger. Dave Wenger died on St-Laurent around Rachel, the subject of a hit and run. Dave Wenger was the most brilliant songwriter and the least successful at the same time. And he inspired so many bands that hail from Victoria, that helped make the Montreal music scene famous—they all went to the Dave Wenger school of songwriting and singing and music-making. Like Wolf Parade or Fashion Parade or whatever the fuck they’re called now that Dan’s busy getting his hair straightened every week. Whatever. Okay, a little bit of a rant there but, yeah, those guys all learned to play music because of Dave Wenger and Dave Wenger’s spirit will be kept alive by unstable rock stars like Tam, who will continue to play his songs. But Dave Wenger was the real fucking deal. And he didn’t try to get famous by stealing other people’s songs and he didn’t learn how to write songs in order to get famous. He was an artist and shit had to come out and it was a way of expressing himself and a way of dealing with his life and he’ll be sorely missed. But, I tell you what, he probably won’t be missing much. R.I.P. Dave Wenger. Fuckin’ the best. [BLEEP!]


ok little x-plane-nation..
In montreal, this guy inspired me the most, and as fate would have it, he died and montreals frenetic and potent mix of talent, energy and pure intentions artistically died along with him.
Montreal Mirror has a phone number you can call in and leave a rant about things that you hate love, etc.
After learning of his death, 3 days after his last show that i missed cuz i was too stoned, and warm and lazy, I walked down St. Laurent taking money out of random cash machines and drinking beers and whisky alone, until I read the mirror, saw the number and called this in from the pay phone in front of Pitariffic.
Best hamburger (cheapest too) in Montreal.
Rachel and St. Lo...
also known as the place where Dave made his big exit form this puppet show.

Curiol City

My arrival in marseille was met with a speedy smooth downhill skateboard to the street car tracks where mary the french rasta would meet me.
older and with more years of pain and paranoia than myself , mary kindly accepted me into her home. her home was an empty shell of a sea side flat made of stone and tile and whatever minerals help guard the cool from the day lght.
in exchange i offered her dinner at the restauraunt of her choice, as well as filling up on some basic needs groceries.
her on bike, me on board we traversed marseille in search of an african joint called baobao. the only street name that i made apoint of remembering was curiol with its curious mini house that was the width and shape of a triangle due to it was built to fill up the space left by two roads who joined to form one..., just one tiny example of the kind of romantic chaos that is represented in the form of architecture here.
in fact all of marseiile seems to have been built without much planning, just a sort of happy, messy accident of criss crossing, zig zagging roads that span this coastal mountain range.
as fate would do, i am now writing this from the apt i stay in on curiol about 3 minutes from that intersection, with a cat named gato, an autistic bello fellow named amaru, and his parents mom and dad.
dad is a crazy belgian artist, and possibly one of the finest jazz rock drummers still alive. mom is a mexcan princess, stern beauty and all ballerina.
curiol is a street of broken prostitutes and unbreakable old ladies who bang on iron and cement all day, with exhaustion written all over every movement.
what is this?
instead of child slave labour, curiol has senior sweat shops?
nothing would surprise me.

in fact not even the fact that the other day i finally earned some money sweating my ass off in a kitchen, and actually - accidentally through that very same money out with the trash.
People who know my history with money will not find it that shocking, but it hasn't happened in a while, which goes to show just how long i have lived off of the kindness and blessings here in Marseille.

Sunday Spiders

Sunday in the Sounth of France with one of the best tables of food ever seen.
Vietnamese barbequed squid, shrimp and beef, served on rice paper with fresh herbs and leaves and veggies all rolled up into a satisfying roll.
One of the tastiest tables i ever ate.

All that and then some nap time with full bellies...
Truly delicious.

Sunday and a real last supper of sorts i think for me here.
This is no long term plan.
It cannot be.
I cannot think about terms longer than weeks or months.
Days are ever random and ever changing.

This is not something new, but something old and its starting to grow on me like a mole grows. You seem somewhat aware, even if you cannot ever get rid of it, it just changes its shape and color and size. And one day you look at it and it looks completely alien and you think, how'd i let it get this bad?

Instead of going after all the spider webs that grow in the corners of your house, sometimes its better to kill the spider.

ROAD KILL ON MARS

Catalogued road
#kill 28

I've seen many dead animals laying on cement roads that penetrate natural land scapes.... such a waste of a life, no one benefits from their death, maybe some scavengers might pick,, and flies will lick, but nothing comes out of it, not even a proper decomposition on that blazing hot asphalt.

Two foxes in 3 days.
What would davey crockett say?
And each day i see the decent, the falttening out and drying up, until one day while holding the g-forces through these curvy soft feminine mountain roads, he's no longer waiting for me... gone.
Just like that.
Maybe someone finally did what all of us lazy commuters know we should have done, and dragged that sorry carcass 3 feet over to where it could lay in relative peacelessness next to the motor way.

But another couple of virages, and there waiting for me is some other sorry soul, a nocturnal accident... stunned by the head lights of our spaceships I am almost certain..
Imagine the contrast between the 16 foot width of man made road and the nature and relative security that surrounds it.. one minute they're doing their thing, as normal, and 30 seconds later if they are lucky they are still doing their thing.
It's God for them.
That unjust bastard, randomly picking people out to make an example for the others.
If only they could step back and take in the bigger picture.
See the waves of cars, understand that at certain daylight hours, one ought to really stay to one side of this strange ground where nothing grows.

or better yet, find all the the animals in the forest and start a protest where they could knock push and drag trees and rocks onto the highway, just to take out a couple of those wasteful creeptures.
Where is their organization?

I guess they struggle to eat, while we struggle to get hungry.
We have nothing in common with the natural world.

How far away is mars??
in hours i mean.

tin foil sea

beatrice looking around the rocks with her beautiful body did a little dance move for franky who waited looking like a black man next to the reflected silhouette that threatened to swallow him whole. her sexy fluttered up from her hips flowed through her torso to her shoulders, and out through her hands, and then she calculatedly dove into the tinfoil sea, swimming like an excited frog, with heartbeat at 360bpms. Afraid of getting a mouthful, she tried to look at ease while struggling to keep her curls above the water... Her firecracker frog snap projected her towards him.
When the waves crashed their two bodies together in a violent act of love,
I smiled and rolled my head to the left to respect their intimacy. The tin foil sea folded and unfolded and reflected intense shots of sun into my face so i hid it under the over hanging bleached out rock and lit a cigarette.
I thought about a love I'd had not too long ago, and that look in her eye.

I layed and listened to the excited screams onlooking girls let out when the brave young boys testing their courage would jump not into the water, but into space, pushing that precious moment that waits for you at your highest high, before the inevitable come down, in this case the penetration of the tin foil hymen glaze that held all the salty wetness beneath.

grenoble means walnutt or chestnutt....

.... sifting through the scrap metal and years of collected and neglected boxes and buckets of refused rusted iron, steel and aluminum wastes, a basket of old plumbing joints marinated in rain water let loose a secretion of slime and the ungodly unholy smell released by the bowels of two unidentifiable dead corpses, my guess baby animals, either birds or frogs, and who knows what other bestioles and insects that thrive off of the floating mix of rusted waters and neglect of old.

The smell. Jesus the stench of aborted fetuses who died shitting themselves mixed with the old and dejected ejaculated preservatifs (rubbers) of last week surely now giving life to deformed degenerates incubating in plastic garbage bins under the 34 degree Celsius southern france mid-summer july heat. A smell i am sure garbage collectors quit their jobs over regularly at this time of year. all babies look the same, but God help whoever catches a glimpse of these poor souls.

Trying to make logic out of the in-organized abandon of a vietnamese restoraunt patron saint of guilt. Who happens to be my (x?)wife's father and who's cook became his lover, and who's family became his burdon.

Life is so repetitive its nausiating.

Everybody sucks, fucks, cheats, lies and steals the same.

No one is exempt from the collective conscious' conscience that keeps us up at night and keeps motivating us in the day to uphold some sort of whacky bizarre translucent facade of having our shit held together, and some 5 year plan for our future.

None if this interests me , or even seems to matter while sipping on a Balantines on the rocks , and beer , under the natural umbrella of a healthy and leafy green tree next to an above ground pool with even greener water. More of a cemetary / breeding ground for lizards slugs and insects of all races, than a place you'd want to soak any one of your orifaces.

This makes me laugh. And as i do, i almost burst out crying.

And so i decide to cheers the sante of all present company, and secretly i dedicate these gulps of emotion numbers to absent family and friends who seem so far away.

All this, on the first day of my 30th year in the garden of my (x?)wife's father, with the father of my (x?)wife's child and the sister of the x-wife of my (x?)wife's child's father.

What?

Quoi?

All the characters are present for your typical french film of an A-typique families life/love story.

Cut.

I Miss You,
I know we were never that great for each other, I know all your cracks and crevices, you know all my crutchs and lies.
We loved and hated each other in perfect equality, and almost destroyed each other in the process.
I miss you montreal,
love always and never,
keir

FUCK YOU BUDDY

Finally a substitute inbox that can replace all those impulsive irresponsible and irretrievable ideas i usually send via email to the people i consider friends.

No body likes mandatory reading, so no one is obliged to read this.

Fuck you buddy, also known as game theory, came out of the beautiful mind of the scientist romanticized and portrayed as the suffered hero by Russell Crowe in the film beautiful mind.
In reality John Nash experimented and won a Nobel "Peace" Prize, for his equation that was inspired by trying to battle and maitain control in the cold war with a system of equations based on betrayal that could determine the actions of others in reaction to yours.
He brought this idea into human interaction and realized that selfish strategy and self interest in a society would not lead to chaos but rather a stability and predictability and sort of equalibrium achieved through a community that is constantly on suspicious, watching and monitering each other, adjusting strategy and betraying trust, in turn achieving the ultimate goal, whether it be love, money or other forms of control and dominance.
Fuck you buddy.